'Til Death; Plum Lucky; Lady, Lady, I Did It!; and King's Ransom

Let me get caught up here!
First, "'Til Death", an Ed McBain reread. Carella's sister, Angela, is getting married, and not one but two different men are after her groom, Tommy (who later becomes a cocaine addict, but that's neither here nor there). It was a pretty good one, because one of the killers is obvious, but the second one isn't (at least, not to me), so just when you think it's all over, it's not.
"Plum Lucky" is a Stephanie Plum book by Janet Evanovich. I was disappointed by this one. It wasn't nearly as funny as most of her other books, and the plot didn't keep me interested. Stephanie's grandmother finds a duffel bag full of money and heads for Atlantic City. Stephanie, Connie, Lulu, and Diesel go after her before the mobster who owns the money gets to her first. At one point Stephanie had to keep a horse in her apartment, which was pretty amusing.
"Lady, Lady, I Did It!" by Ed McBain was another reread (out of the 5 books I ordered online, turns out I had read 3!). This is a sad one: Kling's fiancee, Claire Townsend, is killed in a violent bookstore shooting that leaves a total of 4 people dead. The boys in the 87th have to figure out who the shooter was after in order to solve the crime. At first it looks like it might have been Claire, since she had recently helped a girl obtain an illegal abortion (this was in 1960) and the girl later died from infection from the surgery. Turns out that the killer was after someone else in the bookstore: a man who had argued with him over the $25 paint job on his car. Four people brutally murdered for a lousy paint job. You can see the cynicism coming through. Hell, even I felt cynical reading it.
"King's Ransom" by Ed McBain is one I actually hadn't read yet. A successful businessman on the verge of making the deal of a lifetime gets a phone call from a man claiming to have kidnapped his son and demanding a ransom of $500,000. Unfortunately, it turns out the kidnappers snatched the chauffeur's son by mistake, and Douglas King won't pay the ransom because then he won't be able to buy the stock that will give him control of the company he is hoping to take over. In the end everything works out and the little boy is found safe and sound. Good thing he wrote this one early in his career: later on and the kid would have died. I really liked this one.